New Pressure Sensor Could Help Detect Breast Tumors One Day

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | February 04, 2016 12:38pm ET

The pressure sensors wrap around and conform to the shape of the fingers while
still accurately measuring pressure.
Credit: 2016 Someya Laboratory
A new transparent, bendable pressure sensor could be incorporated into a pair of
latex gloves and one day help doctors check women for breast cancer, without
requiring X-rays, researchers say.
Doctors often touch and feel patients' bodies, applying small amounts of pressure
with their hands, when assessing patients' health. For instance, any hard spots or
lumps may be a sign of abnormalities such as tumors.
In fact, doctors may rely heavily on their "tactile feeling" of a patient's body to
figure out whether the person may have cancer, said study senior author Takao
Someya, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Tokyo.

Pressure sensors could help doctors analyze their patients' health with greater
precision than is possible with their natural sense of touch, the researchers said.
"Tumors are normally more rigid than breast tissue, so we can input that data to a
sensor-attached glove," Someya told Live Science.

However, because human bodies are generally soft, sensors that touch bodies must
be soft too, in order to work well. But so far, pressure sensors that are soft have
been vulnerable to bending, and these devices could not distinguish their own
bending from the variations in pressure in the object they were supposed to
measure, the researchers said.
"Many groups are developing flexible sensors that can measure pressure, but none
of them are suitable for measuring real objects, since they are sensitive to
distortion," study lead author Sungwon Lee, also of the University of Tokyo, said
in the statement.
Now, the scientists say they have developed an ultrasensitive transparent pressure
sensor that can accurately detect pressure even when the sensor is distorted to an
extraordinary degree.

The researchers made the sensor from composite fibers containing graphene, which
are sheets of carbon just one atom thick, and carbon nanotubes, which are carbon
pipes only nanometers (billionths of a meter) in diameter. They took meshes of
these pressure-sensitive, 300-to-700-nanometer-wide fibers and embedded them in
thin, light, transparent, elastic plastic sheets.

When this flat sensor is bent, the nanofibers can shift around in the spaces inside
the mesh, so their sensor capabilities do not change much even when the
sensorsare bent to an extreme degree. However, the sensor can still respond when
compressed by pressure

Even when the pressure sensor is stretched and deformed, the device still measures
the pressure distribution accurately.
Credit: 2016 Someya Laboratory
In experiments, the device successfully measured pressure even when it was placed
on the soft, movable 3D surface of a balloon that researchers pressed their fingers

into. In addition, when the scientists wrapped their sensor around an artificial
blood vessel made of plastic and filled with water, they found that "it could detect
small pressure changes," as well as how fast the pressure was changing, Lee said in
the statement.
The researchers noted that it was too early to suggest that pressure-sensitive gloves
could replace mammography, which uses X-rays to diagnose and locate breast
tumors. Still, one day, "the new sensors may offer easy and painless monitoring of
tumors without exposure to radiation," Someya said.
This new sensor could also make robots sensitive to pressure, Someya said.

"Imagine that you are shaking hands with a robot that has soft skin," Someya said.
"Currently, there is no pressure sensor that accurately works" once it is bent, he
said. If the pressure sensor malfunctions, shaking hands with such a robot could be
very dangerous, since the robot might end up accidentally crushing a person's
hand.

In the future, the researchers want to design a stretchable pressure sensor that can
accurately detect pressure even when the device is stretched, Someya said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 25 in the journal Nature
Nanotechnology.
B. Summary of the Article
Doctors may one day be able to physically screen for breast cancer using pressure-sensitive rubber gloves
to detect tumors, thanks to a transparent, bendable, and sensitive pressure sensor newly developed by
Japanese and American teams. Conventional pressure sensors cant measure pressure changes accurately
once they are twisted or wrinkled, making them unsuitable for use on complex and moving surfaces.